During the past 14 years, University of Virginia history professors Phyllis Leffler and Julian Bond, an icon of the civil rights movement, recorded 51 video interviews with African-American leaders exploring their experiences and the lessons they learned. They sought to preserve and catalog formative experiences of black leaders and core characteristics of black leadership that can inform and inspire the next generation.The project culminated with the publication of “Black Leaders on Leadership: Conversations with Julian Bond,” published by Palgrave Macmillan, and an accompanying w...
Is offering women recruits mani-pedis really any different from, say, inviting students to a networking event at a bar? That happens frequently, and one could argue it’s discriminatory. According to George Rutherglen, a University of Virginia School of Law professor who specialises in employment discrimination, recruitment efforts that target one group over another technically violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Yet an employment discrimination claim must rest on the idea that there’s been an adverse impact on one party. And courts are highly unlikely to rule in favour of a ...
(By S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and chairman of the Science & Environmental Policy Project) The world price of crude oil, which has been around 100 dollars a barrel for the past 6 years, has suddenly collapsed and is now tending below 50 dollars. Many are trying to understand this rapid decrease and have proposed various explanations.
The University of Virginia's Fralin Museum of Art has been given six works by famed artist Andy Warhol that were donated by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
A panel of Virginia senators advanced a bill Monday that would require public colleges to report an alleged campus sexual assault to police within 24 hours of notification, defying the wishes of some survivors and their advocates. On the heels of high-profile cases of rape on college campuses, many victims’ advocates worried that in their zeal to punish perpetrators, lawmakers might take away victims’ rights when they are most vulnerable — and cause a chilling effect on reporting. The move is one of the first indications of how the Virginia General Assembly might act a...
A University of Virginia law school professor is urging fraternities to sue Rolling Stone after the magazine’s now-retracted investigative report on an alleged gang rape. According to an article in the Cavalier Daily, Professor Robert Turner says the university and its Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter have strong grounds for a lawsuit.
A person in charge of creating a sexual assault survey is offering some insight into the process. The University of Virginia, along with 29 other institutions of higher education, will be participation in the nation-wide survey. The Association of American Universities is sponsoring the survey, focusing on campus climate for sexual assault. Professor Nancy Deutsch says it's going to be very extensive and include five questions unique to UVA.
Audie Cornish talks to Nicolette Gendron, a member of Kappa Alpha Theta Sorority at the University of Virginia and a writer for the C-Ville Weekly. She did a survey of sorority members on campus about how they would feel if sororities were allowed to serve alcohol and host parties under the same rules as fraternities. She says most women, including herself, feel that women would have more control and feel safer from sexual predation if they could host parties in their own houses.
Meredith Jung-En Woo remembers declaring to a teacher at her high school in Japan that if Nathaniel Hawthorne had attended Bowdoin College, then so would she. That early cosmopolitanism has influenced her career. Ms. Woo, a professor of politics and a former dean at the University of Virginia, will become, in June, the new director of the International Higher Education Support Program at Open Society Foundations.
Three years ago, Mr. Romney’s tortured approach to his religion — a strategy of awkward reluctance and studied avoidance that all but walled off a free-flowing discussion of his biography — helped doom his campaign. As Mitt Romney mulls a new run for the White House, friends and allies said, his abiding Mormon faith is inextricably tied to his sense of service and patriotism, and a facet of his life that he is determined to embrace more openly in a possible third campaign. “Romney may have a sense of calling to be willing to subject himself to another round of hum...
Did you know that the rate of infidelity in American marriages has not increased in 20 years, even though attitudes toward adultery have loosened in the past 40? More facts, in addition to tips for success are included in the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project’s annual report “The State of Our Unions: Marriage in America 2009.”
More than a dozen education school deans are banding together, aiming to design a coherent set of teacher-preparation experiences, validate them, and shore up support for them within their own colleges and the field at large. "I think it's absolutely important that deans help lead efforts to mobilize ed. schools to take responsibility for what we do and our contributions to public education more broadly, to define those and drive improvements that are identifiable and detectable," said Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and o...
The old culture war politics is dying, but new culture wars are gathering force. The transformation of the battlefield will change our public life. The idea of a “culture war” was popularized by Pat Buchanan in his joyfully incendiary 1992 Republican National Convention speech, but it was introduced into the public argument a year earlier by James Davison Hunter, a thoughtful University of Virginia sociologist. In his 1991 book “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,” Hunter described a raging battle between the orthodox, committed to “an external, def...
(By Alec Horniman is Killgallon Ohio Art Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.) Some people seem to be naturally engaged in most of their activities. Other people seem to be engaged at times and not engaged at other times. Some people seem to be seldom engaged, and they go through their day-to-day activities as though they were on auto pilot. People who are not naturally engaged can choose to be engaged, and when they do, their competences and capabilities are taken to a higher level. There are four ways, found in all of us, to activate t...
Whether he is on a quest for a louder microphone or wants to “change the country,” U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina says he seriously is weighing a run for the White House in 2016. University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato suggested that Graham may figure, “If he’s ever gonna run, now’s the time to do it.” In Sabato’s estimation, Graham’s frequent criticism of Democrat Obama — on Benghazi, Syria, ISIS and a host of other subjects — could help him with GOP voters. But Graham’s support for immigration refor...
Mr. Obama cannot run for president again – U.S. presidents may serve only two terms. But some observers say his most recent State of the Union message sounded like a campaign speech. Larry Sabato directs the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “There was a direct connection between what President Obama said in the State of the Union address and&nb...
The wearable scanner concept was patented by Stan Majewski, a physicist currently at the University of Virginia. Brefczynski-Lewis was inspired by the idea, and got together with Majewski and others to build a prototype. The team received one of the first grants from the president's BRAIN Initiative (short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) — an award of $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health.
Martha Derthick, a former Brookings Institution scholar and University of Virginia professor who was a leading expert on Social Security and other public policy matters, died Jan. 12 at a hospital in Charlottesville, Va. She was 81.
( By Alan Taylor is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.”) More than a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner asserted that the colonial frontier turned European emigrants into American democrats. Having crossed the Atlantic, colonists plunged into a wild world of dense forests and savage people. In braving the dangers and seizing new opportunities, the newcomers gradually shed their European heritage, which valued cohesion, tradition and hierarchy. Thes...
(By Bob Gibson, executive director of U.Va.’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership) When I arrived at the University of Virginia in 1968, the place had an all-male culture, a distinctively Southern flavor and a coat-and-tie uniform dress code. Today’s university has largely chucked the blue blazer code, ceded the all-male culture gig to Hampden-Sydney and quietly seceded from the Old South. The university has gone international in a big way. Last year, China sent 451 undergraduate students and 429 graduate students to Charlottesville to study at the university. China’s...